


For In That Sleep Of Death

by AconitumNapellus



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Childhood, Cynophobia, Dreams, Holocaust, Kyiv, M/M, Memories, Nightmares, Snow, WWII, fear of dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 20:29:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21214595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: Illya finds himself slipping between waking and dreams, between now and the past, between security and fear. What is happening to him?[Content warning for holocaust mention, war related trauma, graphic scenes, and implied male on female rape.]Written for the LiveJournal Hallowe'en Challenge to a prompt by Pfrye23.





	For In That Sleep Of Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pfrye23](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pfrye23/gifts).

> to die, to sleep;  
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end  
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks  
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation  
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,  
perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,  
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,  
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,  
Must give us pause.  
\-- Hamlet, in Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, by William Shakespeare

1.

  


The snow is so thick that it blurs the world in front of his eyes. The city is a mirage of dark promises, wavering behind a veil. Flake by flake by flake, so many flakes he can’t see clearly more than two feet in front of his face. Somewhere above him the clouds are so thick and intense, bright and dark, it’s like walking beneath one of his grandmother’s quilts.

He remembers the needle flashing in and out, the river-map pattern of veins on her hands. Her blood must be blue. Why is the blood of old people blue, when his blood is so red? He saw it well in beads from grazes on his knees. He’s touched a hand to his nose and looked at his fingers, wet and crimson. When he cut his hand on the broken glass, his blood was bright as life.

Her blood looked blue in its knotty veins. Tree roots, they were. Her hand moving, liver-spotted, holding a needle. He remembers her humming, sometimes singing, her voice slipping between one and the other as the needle flashed, as her bright, old eyes looked down at the drape of fabric over her knees, up at him, down at the cloth again. Her humming voice, his eyes getting heavier, heavier, overcome by such a heat.

The cloth was like snow over her knees. Old sheets. Old night dresses. She stuffed the goose down between the layers and she stitched such a wonder over the landscape of white. She made hills and flowers.

_ Don’t spill a drop on my beautiful quilt, Illyusha. Not a drop. _

His eyes closing, closing. Sinking into dreams.

Somewhere, far away, a wolf is howling.

  


2.

  


‘Illya?’

Napoleon is shaking his arm. Then he hits it. Illya jolts, and stares.

‘What?’

His arm stings where Napoleon hit it.

‘There.’

Napoleon points into the darkness. Somewhere, on the other side of the courtyard, a figure is moving. There’s no snow. It’s warm. The sky above is a deep, deep blue, and there are stars like frozen fire. A figure in black is moving along by the wall, walking upright, confident, a rifle held resting against his shoulder.

‘The guard,’ Illya murmurs.

It’s hot. Night. The previous day’s heat is rising from the flagstones. He can hear noises from the streets outside the complex, but they seem far away.

‘You were supposed to take him out, buddy,’ Napoleon says in a voice as dry as the desert air. ‘Remember?’

‘Oh,’ Illya says. He blinks, and recalls his mission. ‘He’ll pass back in five minutes,’ he says. ‘It shouldn’t upset our plans.’

‘Where were you?’ Napoleon asks.

Snow falling, so thick he can hardly see. Where was he? He can’t think. If he can’t think, he can’t say. There’s a dog barking somewhere. It makes shivers move up and down his spine. He feels cold, even though the air is warm.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Sorry. Just distracted.’

‘Get him on the next round,’ Napoleon tells him. ‘Illya. I’m relying on you.’

He feels the warm metal of his gun in his hand. Solid. Dependable.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, I know.’

  


((O))

  


The snow is like interference on a tuned-out television. A scramble of light and dark, white flakes blurring. A swarm of flies all buzzing over his eyes. Interference on a television. Left over energy from the beginning of the universe.

He could raise his hand and catch snowflakes in it. He could dot them onto his tongue. But it’s cold. It would be stupid to get colder still.

Through the lace curtain of flakes he sees a figure move. Someone in a cloak. Isn’t that someone in a cloak, a darkness behind the fuzzed out thickness of the snow? Someone moving. He’s sure he can see someone, indistinct in a dark cloak. He doesn’t understand. He thought he was alone.

  


((O))

  


‘Illya, I’m worried about you.’

‘Huh?’

He blinks, and looks. Napoleon is in the seat next to him. The drone of the engines is a white noise, an audible version of that white static, that chaos of snow. The air smells of cigarette smoke and alcohol, like a bar in the air. That’s what this is, really. A bar in the air, aimless people all trapped until the bird sets down. People of all types, the only common theme being that they need to get somewhere, and can afford a ticket.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says, putting a hand on his thigh.

The lap trays are down. No one can see. Napoleon’s hand is broad and warm and it presses firmly, pressing through the thinness of his suit trousers. He can feel his fingertips, each one pressing as if each one cares.

‘We almost missed the deadline for getting those papers,’ Napoleon says in a low voice. ‘Illya?’

‘Yes,’ Illya says.

The papers are safe in the case, stored in the locker above his head. They both look like businessmen. The papers don’t look like anything special.

He glances at the window again. They’re above the clouds, so they spread like a brilliant white quilt, puffed up with softness. Like one of his grandmother’s quilts. Like a landscape covered in snow. There are little ice crystals on the window, clustered around that pinprick hole that equalises the pressure. There’s no snow out there, though, not up here. The clouds are made up of a billion, trillion little particles of ice, but there’s no snow up here. Just the dizzying depth of the sky above them, the blazing sun, and space.

He feels confused. He feels as though he’s woken from a dream, but his glass is in his hand and he thought he’d been talking to Napoleon, and he doesn’t think he was dreaming. The snow was real, though. That thick depth of falling snow, the vision of someone slipping past, someone in a dark cloak, hood pulled over her face.

They’re at thirty thousand feet. There’s no falling snow, no one outside.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon nudges him again. ‘You almost missed taking out the guard, and if you had, we wouldn’t have completed the mission. I’ve never known you to be a bad shot. I’ve never known you to be distracted when you should be focussed. But recently – ’

‘I know,’ he says.

He wipes the back of his hand over his face. He takes a sip of his drink. The scotch is very real, very strong in his mouth. But when he closes his eyes he sees snow, coming down in veils.

‘I’m sorry, Napoleon,’ he says.

He’s afraid. That’s the hardest thing. He’s afraid he’s losing his mind, and he doesn’t know what to say. It’s hard to turn to a person, even to the closest person in your life, and say,  _ I think I’m going mad _ . What happens then? Where do you go from there?

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says, and there’s a hard edge of frustration in his voice. ‘Being sorry is one thing, but I need to know it won’t happen again.’

He rubs his hand over his eyes, and in that moment of darkness he sees snow falling.

‘Maybe – ’ he says. ‘Maybe I could do with a little time off. I’ll talk to the old man when we get back.’ 

  


  


3.

  


He’s standing in the street, and the snow is coming down. It might be snow, it might be ash. He thinks it’s snow.

Yes. Snow. When he turns his face upwards each flake is cold on his skin. His ears are cold, and his fingers burn with cold. His gloves were knitted by his mother, and there’s a hole in the left one, just in the V between thumb and forefinger. Snowflakes get in, and melt, and his hands are cold. He’s standing in the street, and the buildings are grey shadows because there’s so much snow. He knows that there are broken windows. He knows there are burnt and tumbled walls. But he can’t see them, because of the snow. Only the grey shapes. Only the sense that the street is long, stretching away past the snow.

He walks, and his feet are crunching. His shoes are leather, black. The leather is creased and there’s almost a hole. Almost a hole right over his big toe, his right foot. His feet are growing but his shoes don’t change. Where will new shoes come from? Do shoes grow on trees?

_ Mama, they grow on cows. Do cows eat trees? _

The innocence of his response. The way his mother’s lips press together so there’s a whiteness around them. Her eyes look like his grandmother’s. Not as wrinkled, not like an old elephant’s skin. But they’re like his grandmother’s. He can see that. Her lips go a little pale, a little whiteness about them, and then she smiles.

She’s not here now. She must be inside, but he’s in the street, and the snow keeps falling. He can feel the cold in the tips of his toes. He can feel the wetness in his gloves, because the snow melts against the heat of his skin. His fingertips are as cold as the tips of his toes, singing with cold pain. There are little bits of translucent ice caught up in the dark blue wool. When he walks, the snow crunches under his feet, the worn soles of his shoes slip a little. It’s as if the distance is moving with him, because nothing gets any closer. The veil of snow keeps the end of the street unreachable, and no matter how far he walks it’s always just as far away.

There are figures moving like ghosts. Everything is quiet because of the snow. He can’t hear their voices or their footsteps. He sees a man walk up to another man, his head a curious smooth dome because of the helmet protecting it. The helmet protecting the fragile eggshell skull within. He sees one lean in a little towards the other. He sees the sudden glow of a cigarette being puffed into life.

Why is he the only one out here? There’s no one else here except for those men with their smooth helmets and their lit cigarettes. He can’t see the smoke because of the snow. He feels a little longing for the warmth, but not to be anywhere near those men. He doesn’t ever want to be anywhere near those men. He doesn’t want to taste the smoke, but the warmth would be so nice.

He blinks. There’s snow on his eyelashes. His face is wet and cold. He can see something else with the men, something low down and moving. It is a dog. The chills run down his spine. His hair prickles on the back of his neck. He can see it, like a wolf, sharp jointed and hungry. It’s standing with the man, but it’s looking around, sniffing the air. It’s looking at him…

He takes a step backwards. He tries to breathe, and it’s so cold that for a moment his lungs refuse to work. He takes another step. He feels dizzy and tired, and he steps again, and then he turns. He wants to run, but his body is like lead. The street behind him is as long as the street ahead. Both directions are obscured by the falling snow. He can hear a noise behind him, the dog starting to bark, the men barking in their foreign language, the click of guns.

Behind him are the men and the dog. Ahead of him, in the veil of snow, he sees someone moving, a gliding figure, a cloak and no more.

He doesn’t know which way to turn. He is so afraid.

  


((O))

  


He starts out of sleep, gasping. This time it was a dream. Napoleon is a long, low mass in the bed, a shadow in the darkness. He sits up, pressing a hand against his chest, staring around in the dark. He can feel the wet of sweat all against the palm of his hand. He can feel the roughness of hair on his chest. An adult man. No snow. There’s no snow, but under the covers is like a sauna, and outside of them his sweat is being stolen by the air. He is shivering hard.

He slips out of bed, naked, trying to catch his breath. He pulls on a dressing gown, Napoleon’s, he thinks. It’s a little long. He thinks of the figure in the cloak, the raised hood.

He walks out of the bedroom, into the bathroom. The light is a sudden shock. He pulls the cord by the mirror, the shaving light flickers on, and his face looks weird. There are bags under his eyes, stubble on his cheeks. His eyes are bloodshot, little river patterns of bright red.

He rubs a hand over his jaw, and it feels like sandpaper. He’s not going mad, maybe. This was just a dream. He’s had this dream before. He can still feel the dog behind him. He can still feel the prickling along his spine. But his temperature is equalising inside the snugness of the dressing gown, the heat of the bed blending into the cool of the air.

He stands over the toilet and pisses. It’s a loud, liquid noise in the silence. He doesn’t flush or do up his dressing gown. He just shakes out the drops, washes his hands, and turns out the light. In the darkness of the apartment he walks silently through to the kitchen. He turns on another light, the fluorescent bar on the ceiling that buzzes and hums. He puts a small saucepan on the burner, lights the gas, and heats up a cup of milk. He pours whiskey into the warm milk, sits on a wooden kitchen chair, and drinks.

Snow falling. He tries to understand. He looks into the creamy white of the milk, and tries to understand. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him. He doesn’t know if he’s going mad.

  


4.

  


‘So, have you spoken to Waverly?’ 

The net is closed across the window. It looks like a veil of snow. Behind it is the glass, then the street, the air, the brownstones opposite. It’s cold out there, because it’s getting later in Autumn, but it’s not snowing. The sky is blue. The curtain is not snow. It is not snow.

‘I’m going to, later,’ Illya says.

The cup of coffee is warm between the palms of his hands. The ceramic is solid, warm, smooth. It feels like such a stable thing. But another part of him sees snow falling, and the cup in his hands is fluted like a shell, undulating, and barely a scent of tea is rising in the steam. The scent is mostly from the dark tannin-layered sides of the teapot, because there’s little tea left. There’s only a scrap of milk, so the liquid swirls like translucent marble.

Outside, the snow is falling so thickly he can’t see the park on the other side of the street. He can just see the shapes of trees like ghosts, like dim humps through the shifting veil. The street is white, and there are bootprints in the snow, but they’re filling fast. He sees someone moving through the flakes, moving towards the gate into the park. Is it a man? Is it a soldier? Perhaps there’s a dog at his heels. Perhaps there’s another shape, the low shape of a dog. He feels a tight little shiver, like something pulling a thread through his vertebra, pulling them tight. The dog starts to bark.

His mother rests a hand on his shoulder; but it’s not his mother, is it? It’s Napoleon, and it’s a cup of coffee in his hands, not tea. It’s a net curtain in front of his eyes, not falling snow. The barking is just a dog in the street.

‘ – or you’ll be late,’ Napoleon is saying. ‘Seriously, Illya.’

‘What?’ he asks.

He feels a little sickness, as if he’s suddenly missed a step, as if he’s looked down and found himself very high, above a terrible drop.

‘ _ Shave _ ,’ Napoleon tells him. ‘You can pick up something to eat from the commissary. You need to go shave. We’ll be late.’

Is he going mad? He’s afraid. There’s still a dog barking outside, but he’s afraid that somewhere, somewhere, he can hear a howl.

He lifts his cup and drinks some coffee. He makes himself aware of that dark, smooth taste, of the cream in his mouth. He swallows and feels the heat. He drinks the whole mug, gulp after gulp, and he goes into the bathroom and turns on the tap and lathers up foam like light clouds of meringue. Like snow. The water steams up from the white ceramic. He covers his chin in that insulating snow, tightens the razor, draws the blade across his cheek. It cuts a swathe in the snow each time, like rolling a snowball over an overnight fall, picking it up and revealing the ground beneath. The spike of stubble is gradually shaved away, and he cups his hands and splashes water over his face, so hot it stings.

He’s buttoning his shirt, his tie hanging loose about his neck, when he hears that piercing howl. His skin prickles. He breathes in so sharply it hurts. 

He’s outside, and snow is falling. His breath is a shimmer of white in the air. The snow is a deep, coruscating mass of flakes, his breath making billowing clouds that the flakes cut through. He’s looking left and right, listening for that sound.

It comes again. The long, resonant howl. It’s like music, like strange music somewhere beyond his sight. He’s drawn to it, and he’s so afraid. He’s stepping along the street, and his feet are cold in thin leather shoes. They’re wearing through. Soon his right big toe will make a hole. They’re splitting where the leather meets the sole.

But he steps, so afraid, too afraid to stay still, too afraid to move. The dogs are singing, their voices rising, and he’s drawn to them like Odysseus tied to his mast. Entranced but afraid, straining against whatever would keep him where he stands. He needs to hear that song. He’s so afraid.

He can hear snarling, tearing. Someone screams. He’s running now, running and running, his feet slipping on the snowy ground, the road so hard beneath the snow. Every footfall makes his bones jar, makes the impact resonate up through his body, right into his jaw and skull. He has his ear flaps down, tied under his chin, but it doesn’t make the screaming quieter, and he runs towards it like a man running towards a terrible accident.

Hands are on his arms. Horns sounding like the calls of wild beasts. A man shouting, his Queens accent so thick it’s hard to understand his words. There’s no snow. No snow at all. His feet are bare, shirt half buttoned, his tie loose and flapping about his neck.

‘ – the hell is wrong with you?’

He’s standing in the middle of the road, cars snarled to a standstill. A man waving an arm out of the window of a cab. Someone else getting out and slamming his door.

He looks down. His feet are bare. Napoleon’s hands are on his arms.

‘Illya? Illya, what is it? Did you see something?’

Understandably, he’s concerned. Of course he is. His partner is going mad.

‘I – ’ He shakes his head, looking around at the street, the cars. ‘I thought I saw something. Yes, I thought I saw something.’

He thinks quickly.

‘I thought I saw Charles Tallis. You know he’s been on the wanted list for months. I thought I saw him in the street.’

Napoleon huffs. ‘Next time you see one of our Most Wanted, don’t run out in bare feet without a weapon, okay?’

He’s leading Illya back down the street. He’s a hundred yards from the door to the apartment building. He must have run. His feet sting.

He makes himself laugh.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think. We’d better get back inside. We’re going to be late for work.’

‘ _ You’re _ telling  _ me _ that?’ Napoleon asks sardonically.

  


((O))

  


Inside, his feet hum as they regain their warmth. He hadn’t noticed how cold the ground was outside. He pulls on one black sock, then another, and his feet hum as the blood warms the cells of his skin. Napoleon is standing there, impatient, holding out his shoes. They’re going to be late. He’s not sure he should be in work at all. He’s afraid he’s going mad.

  


5.

  


‘Honestly, I’m worried about you, Illya,’ Napoleon says as they drive through the streets.

The traffic is slow. They would have been better on the subway, but the subway isn’t as safe. It’s always better to be in control.

‘You’re – what? Are you blacking out? What’s going on with you?’

Illya has a slice of toast in his hand, greasy with butter. A chance to get something in him before he gets to work. He’s hungry, more hungry than he has a right to be. He feels as if he hasn’t slept, as if he’s been up all night. The world seems raw, more real than it has for days. The sky is a pale blue, the buildings a warm red-brown. Lights flash, people move, each car is a bright wedge of colour.

‘I’m all right,’ he says. ‘We’ve been travelling a lot recently. Time zones. I think it’s catching up with me. Jet lag.’

Napoleon glances sideways at him. ‘Jet lag? Illya, I’ve seen you skip from hemisphere to hemisphere, twelve hours round the world and back again, and write a sixteen page report on a mission without a single spelling error. Jet lag?’

He takes another bite of his toast. It’s cold now, but he’s so hungry, as if he hasn’t eaten for days.

‘These things catch up with you eventually,’ he says.

He hopes that’s the truth. He looks through the window of the car at the great plate glass sheets fronting a grand department store. For a moment, between the double layer of glass, he sees a blizzard. He turns away, bites at the toast again. He can’t let the snow intrude. Things seemed so real. He can’t let it happen.

  


6.

  


In the office, the heating is on high. The air feels stifling. It always happens when they’re away. They come home, and someone has fiddled with the heating controls. It’s just too hot.

He’s hungry again. The slice of toast wasn’t enough. He needs to meet with Waverly. He needs to talk about having some time off. But he’s afraid it won’t happen. He has enough leave stacked up, but he knows the boss.  _ It’s a busy time at the moment, I’m afraid. We just can’t do without you, Mr Kuryakin _ .

There’s no point in anticipating. He needs to structure his argument. He needs to make it clear that he desperately needs some time, without making it look like he’s going mad.

Is he going mad? It’s a terrifying thing, to not be sure of your own mind. He has his insecurities, of course, but he’s a decisive person. You learn, in this business, to make your decisions quickly.

This isn’t about decisions, though. There’s no decision in this. He’s sitting in his office, fingers on the typewriter keys, Napoleon at the other desk, and then he feels the cold like a cloak, he breathes in the metallic taste of snow, he can smell the acrid scent of burning.

He looks around, and sees no snow, but the scent is as real as the chair he’s sitting in. The cold is all through him despite the vents softly slipping heated air into the room. He feels very afraid. He doesn’t know if he’s afraid of the smells, or the fact that he’s experiencing them in a warm room, far away from snow or burning.

‘I’m going to run out for something to eat,’ he says abruptly. ‘I’ll bring back coffee.’

The walls look as if they’re made of falling snow. The scent is so cold in his nostrils. Such a fresh, metallic scent.

Napoleon rises to his feet and comes across the little room. He puts a hand on Illya’s cheek.

‘You’ll be all right?’

‘Of course,’ Illya assures him. ‘I’m just running out for something to eat. That’s all.’

  


((O))

  


The corridor walls look like snow. Everything looks like snow. He stands in the elevator and presses his balled fists into his eyes until he sees a white and black static fuzz, replaced by black and red when he drops his hands. He stands and jingles loose change in his pocket. His stomach growls. A pastry, he thinks. A pastry and a coffee. Something to push away the hunger, push away the cold.

He goes out through the little tailor’s shop without even looking at Del Floria. He hears him speak, but it’s as if it’s far away. He’s jingling the coins in his pocket, trying to cling to that sharp metallic sound, because it’s something that’s real, something undeniable. He feels the rough-smooth slip of one coin face over another. He presses them between his fingertips, and grinds them slowly against each other, Lincoln’s face grinding against Jefferson’s, Jefferson against Roosevelt. The feeling sets his teeth on edge, but it’s real.

The cars are real in the street outside, crawling slowly. There’s a chill in the air, autumn in full swing. There aren’t many trees here, but if there were there would be brown leaves scudding in the wind. Here, there are scraps of paper instead. A metal can that’s been crushed under a car’s tread. A scrap of cellophane darting, resting, darting again under the touch of the breeze, moving like a bird, its facets reflecting little shards of light like a glittering eye.

He’s pressing kopeks together in his pocket, through the wet woollen fingertips of his gloves. There’s a hole in the left glove, just the right size to let a coin slip in, to feel it against his skin, to slip it out again into his pocket. He fiddles with the coins, slips a coin in, lets it warm, slips it out again. He shuffles his fingers, finds another coin, and it’s biting cold against his palm when he slips it through the hole. Cold, but a good feeling. It’s a real feeling, more real than anything else.

His stomach grinds. There wasn’t much for breakfast. The coins in his pocket won’t do him any good, not unless he can find someone who’s willing to slip him half a bread roll for a ridiculously inflated price.

_ You’ll never be tall _ , his mother tuts over the breakfast table.  _ All the fault of those -  _

She trails off because she never likes to call them by name. She doesn’t like to call them soldiers. She won’t call them what she really thinks of them, not in front of her son. Illya knows enough what they are. They have guns. They kill people. They ration the food.

He walks past one store front, past another. One is boarded up. One still has its glass. One has a broken window like a screaming mouth, and the inside of the room is a shell, shelves broken, the walls black with soot. He remembers going there with mama just last year, walking past the great glass windows, seeing the produce inside.

_ Don’t put your hand on the glass, Illya. You’ll leave greasy prints, then someone will have to clean it. No, just look, don’t touch. _

He had been such a child then, pressing himself against windows and believing he could have what was inside.

There’s a veil of snow over the city, snow coming down like static in the sky. The flakes are dark like ash against the brightness of the clouds. The buildings become a faded blur. He rubs snow out of his right eye with the back of his glove, and it smears wetness over his face. He pulls his scarf higher over his mouth. It’s damp and hot with his breath. His earflaps are down over his ears, his head is almost warm, but his hands and feet are so cold.

There’s snow over everything. Snow on the onion domes of the church, so they blend in with the sky. The building next door is a strange, chaotic mess of blackened beams, tumbled walls, windows broken into shards. The wall of the church is blackened, but it survived. Somehow, it survived. The old people say that god protected it, but they say it very quietly.

He remembers a time when he went out into the streets in the snow and raced along with friends, screaming with joy, pulling a home-made sled on a long cord. Maybe it was only last winter. It feels like long, long ago, like another life, but his life hasn’t been very long so far.

The snow is veiling everything, and people further down the street are indistinct. Men? Women? Soldiers? Sometimes he hears a gun, and it sounds like a sudden snap, like an ending. Every time it makes him jolt, even though he’s heard them so many times before.

He crosses the road. He stands in front of the great iron gates to the park. They still look beautiful. The park is little changed. No one comes to open the gates in the morning and shut them at night, though, so he lifts the latch himself and goes through, and soft little cowls of snow teeter on the iron scrolls, and fall.

There are trees in there, crowding close to the gate. The grass was allowed to grow, the bushes weren’t trimmed back. Now, in winter, the trees have black, leafless branches, and each one is rimmed with snow, white on black. Is there something moving between the trunks of the trees? Something dark, and low. Something silent.

He’s standing in the bakery, holding out a handful of coins. His hand is bare, no dark wool gloves, no hole just big enough for a kopek between thumb and forefinger. The baker is handing him a brown paper bag, and a warm scent is rising. The scent of yeast and dough. He remembers that smell, standing in his grandmother’s kitchen, the heat billowing out from the open oven door like a momentary blast of summer. Grandmother stooping, making a little groan, slipping out a tray of beautiful loaves, the crusts as brown as a girl’s summer tan.

He takes the bag and feels the warmth coming through the paper. He is so hungry it hurts. He could tear into this like a dog. He walks out into the snowless street and he’s already tearing the paper open, inhaling the scent. He bites into it as the door closes behind him. Sugar. Almonds. Dough. It’s so good it makes him want to weep. He should have bought two, three, four. He could have bought the whole tray. He has the money, and the baker has the goods. He never needs to be hungry again.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon reaches out to him when he steps back into the office, and tenderly dusts a little powdered sugar from his lapel, then from his lip.

‘Better?’ he asks, but before Illya can answer he leans in to kiss him. ‘Mmm, marzipan,’ he says, and he lets his tongue linger on Illya’s lip.

Illya kisses back, tasting Napoleon’s tongue, so warm and real. For a moment it feels strange. He feels like a boy standing in a snow-covered street, and like a man standing in front of his lover. He clings to the reality, to Napoleon’s warm mouth and lips. He puts a hand on the back of Napoleon’s neck and kisses him hard, letting that be the only reality there is.

‘I thought you were getting coffee?’ Napoleon asks, when the kiss is done.

Illya blinks.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I forgot.’

Napoleon laughs softly. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me? Listen, Illya, I took the opportunity of talking to Waverly while you were out. I hope you don’t mind. I – ’

‘You talked to Waverly? About me?’

He feels a little prickle. If he had hackles, they would be rising. His fur would be rising, like a frightened dog.

Napoleon lifts his hands in a kind of surrender. ‘Hey. I just asked if we could both have a little time off. You’re right. It’s been mad recently. We have time owing.’

‘What did he say?’ Illya asks suspiciously.

‘He can give us a little time,’ he says. ‘Just not just yet. We’ve got Hungary to get out of the way first. Then we can have a week.’

The thought of Hungary is like a band tightening around his chest. The thought of a week off afterwards is a long outward breath. But he has to get through Hungary first, and he’s afraid. Napoleon relies on him, and he’s afraid.

  


7.

  


_ Баю баюшки баю... _

His grandmother sings so softly. He is so warm, bundled under the quilts she stitched, covered to the chin, head sunk into the softness of the goose-down pillow. He is so warm as she sings about the wolf. Her voice is so low, it’s almost like a dream, almost like the slow drift of snow outside the window.

_Баю-баюшки-баю, не ложися на краю. Придет серенький волчок…_

He is so sleepy. He feels very small. Outside it is dark and the snow is coming down so thickly that it’s as if the entire world were made of snow. He can’t believe in deserts or running water, only in snow and snow and snow, and ice beneath.

He believes in the wolf, in the wolf that’s waiting out there in the darkness, waiting to tear apart the children who don’t take care. He believes in the forest because he knows it’s out there. He knows there are the thick trunks of trees, the willow with its bare branches, the aspen reaching out its arms. He knows the colour of blood.

He is sinking, sinking, so warm and safe. He thinks of the wolf. He thinks of his grandmother’s hands, the veins like the roots of trees, dark like the blood of berries. He thinks of the wolf, prowling between the trees, leaving great paw marks in the snow. He thinks of its mouth opening, the hot breath steaming in the frozen air, the little cloud of white vapour, the teeth, sharp and vicious and – 

He jerks awake, his foot kicking as if he’s kicking away something that means to bite him. His grandmother’s singing falters, her hand strokes his head. Was she even singing any more, or had she stopped? He’s lying there in the bed, looking at the low, rough ceiling above his head. There’s no electric light, only a lamp burning. His grandmother hushes him. He feels like his eyes are very big, and hers are very small. Her hand is soft and cool on his head. She whispers something, and he says in a dazed way,  _ The wolf, the wolf… _

She hushes him again. Her hand stays still for a moment. Her eyes sparkle, as if they’re wet. She whispers, bends low, kisses his forehead. She starts singing again, but the song has changed.

  


8.

  


They are lying together in bed, in warmth, in the dark. There’s no sound but the city sounds outside. The only lights are the city lights that come through the window. They are lying close, under the covers, arm just touching arm. He’s tired, sleepy, but he’s afraid of sleep. He’s not sure what is sleep and what is not. He’s not sure what’s a dream. Sometimes he thinks he’s dreaming, but he’s not asleep. He thinks he’s awake, but he’s dreaming. He sees the wolf prowling, faded out by the falling snow, head low, ears alert, tilted forward, listening.

Napoleon turns his head, and his eyes are just visible, shining a little in the light from the window. He turns onto his side and touches a hand to Illya’s cheek.

‘Talk to me, partner,’ he says softly. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

Illya closes his eyes. He doesn’t know how to talk. He doesn’t know what’s happening in his mind. His throat feels as if it’s swelling, as if words won’t come out.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says again. ‘Let me in.’

‘I don’t know,’ he says eventually, and he has to force those words out. ‘I don’t – ’

‘I want you to see the doctor,’ Napoleon tells him.

He feels cold. He’s so afraid of what the doctor might say, because it wouldn’t be a doctor, would it? It would be a psychiatrist, and he’d tell him he was going mad. He’d lose his job, his freedom, everything, in one fell swoop. He can’t bear to think of being confined to a hospital, locked in, with psychiatrists probing his mind.

‘It’s – something – ’ he says eventually, because talking to Napoleon has to be better than talking to a doctor.

‘It’s obviously  _ something _ ,’ Napoleon returns, and Illya feels like he’s run into a wall.

‘Don’t,’ he says. It’s so hard to get words out. ‘Napoleon, don’t. Just let me – ’

‘Okay,’ Napoleon says gently. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll shut up. Just talk to me, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Illya says, but he’s quiet for a long time, because he doesn’t know what to say.

‘Are you asleep?’ Napoleon asks after a while.

‘No,’ Illya says.

‘Are you going to talk to me?’

He eases his arm out from between them, lifts his hand, holds it for Napoleon to take. Napoleon’s fingers are warm and strong, and they hold his hand firmly. He feels as though Napoleon would never let him fall, physically, but how can a hand hold a mind?

‘I keep – I don’t know,’ he falters. ‘I don’t know if it’s – dreams, memories, hallucinations...’

‘It’s something,’ Napoleon murmurs, and Illya tightens his hand. He feels so afraid.

‘I feel like I’m living in two worlds,’ he says. ‘Like I’m in two worlds. I’m – ’

Scared. He’s scared. It’s cold, and he’s scared. The streets are quiet and empty, but somewhere there’s the crackle of guns. They took three of the neighbours yesterday, a couple and their wide-eyed child, all thin-cheeked and afraid. His mother told them they’d be fine, but he doesn’t believe her, because they’ve taken people before and he’s never seen them again. He’s heard whispered things, overheard conversations. He’s afraid the snapping guns and the disappeared people might have come to the same destination. He’s afraid of the pit he heard they were digging in the park.

He’s walking in the street, and his feet are so cold. The snow has been stamped into dirty ice. No one has thrown down grit or straw. Windows are broken, the air is tinted with the acrid scent of burning, of unclean things that were never meant to be burnt. It’s so cold, and he knows his mother is afraid they won’t survive the winter. She’s afraid of the gunshots, of the men, of them starving because all the good food has been taken away. She makes soups out of nothing, because water is the only thing in good supply. It falls from the sky.

The gates into the park are tall and black, the curlicues capped with thick little layers of snow. The trees beyond are black and wet, frozen and layered with ice and snow. Somewhere, he hears a dog howl.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon says.

He’s warm and in bed, and Napoleon’s hand is on his cheek, his other hand holding Illya’s, his fingers warm like the summer. Illya’s own hand feels cold, he feels small and hungry and afraid. 

‘I keep – seeing another time,’ he says. He’s dizzy. He doesn’t know what’s happening. ‘I don’t know how to – The snow, and – ’

Napoleon smiles and strokes his cheek.

‘It’s like you’re being – haunted,’ he says tentatively. ‘Illya, you keep drifting away. Your body is here, but I don’t know where your mind goes. Like you’re blacking out. I want you to go see the doctor in the morning.’

‘No,’ Illya says sharply.

Everything is suddenly in focus. Napoleon’s face, the dark room, the fluctuating light through the window. Everything is real. The scent of the washing powder in the sheets. The sounds of cars outside. A siren wailing, somewhere.

‘It could be serious,’ Napoleon says softly. ‘Illya, it could be very serious. I’m worried about you.’

‘You think  _ I’m _ not worried about me?’ Illya jerks out. ‘Napoleon, I’m afraid if I tell them they’ll put me away.’

Napoleon is silent. Everything in the room is silent. Outside, the city moves on, but in the room everything is still. Then Napoleon says, ‘Tell me, Illya. I’m not going to put you anywhere. Trust me, please.’

He knows that if Napoleon is worried enough he will force him to go to the doctor. He knows that Napoleon won’t just listen and smile and tell him everything’s fine. But he doesn’t know what else to do.

‘When I was a boy – ’ he begins.

He’s standing in the park. There’s someone there, someone standing in the falling snow. Someone wearing a cloak, long and dark, the dark hood over her head, the cloak falling to her feet. She’s turned away from him. She looks so familiar, so strangely familiar, but she’s turned away.

The fear is like a live thing inside him. He’s just a boy, no more than a boy, and he’s thin and hungry and cold. His right shoe is wearing through. There are cracks in them both. His glove has a hole in it. His ear flaps are down but he’s cold. It’s always so cold. He’s so tired of hunger and fear and cold.

He wants to turn and run. He wants to turn and see Napoleon there, but he knows he won’t be there. He wants to ask her who she is, but he can’t make himself speak.

  


9.

  


He walks through the streets. For a while it’s snowing, but then it stops. Everything is intensely familiar. He knows each face of each building so well. Some of them even seem to have eyes. Some have been half blinded. Some have been destroyed. Somehow the city has become black and white, and even the remaining colours have become drained.

He walks for a while, but he sees no one. Sometimes he hears guns or dogs, but he sees only shadows moving in the distance, or hears things far away.

After a while he sees the sun is moving lower. It’s behind thick clouds, but he can tell it’s getting lower by the way the light changes. The cold in the air is growing colder, stiller, more like a kind of ice. The light turns blue, like ice, in the shadows.

He turns around and walks back through the streets, feeling that awful prickling down his spine, afraid he’s turning his back on something that might take him from behind, at any moment.

The block of flats is eerily empty. He walks up the steps, and the sound of his feet echoes in the stairwell. No one is using the rubbish chute. There are no sounds of talking, shouting, singing. Nothing at all. He doesn’t understand. He feels so small and so alone and so afraid.

The door isn’t locked, and he turns the handle and calls out, ‘Mama?’ but no one answers. No one is there. The place is empty, but it doesn’t smell like an empty home. It doesn’t smell abandoned. There’s just no one there.

He goes inside and tries the electric light. It doesn’t turn on, but he isn’t surprised. He remembers how unreliable the power was. He goes into the cramped kitchen and opens the food larder, and the cold from outside surges into the room. The larder is empty, and that doesn’t surprise him either.

He lights an oil lamp and carries it carefully through into the living room.

_ Always take care, Illyusha _ , he hears his mother say.  _ You’re carrying fire. You’re like Prometheus. Always take care. _

He does take care. The lamp feels large and heavy in his hands, but at least it’s warm. He sets it on the low table in front of the divan. He moves it a little away from the centre, and fetches the samovar. He fills the kettle with water and sets it to boil, and while it’s heating he finds the teapot and searches for tea. There is a scrap, a tiny amount in a twist of paper, in the bottom of the tea tin, twisted up in paper as if that will protect it from being used. But there’s no one here and surely this is all a dream, so he shakes a little of what’s there into the teapot, and brings it through to the table, where the samovar is starting to boil.

The smell is so familiar. The smell of the charcoal burning, the samovar heating and boiling the water, is so familiar it hurts. It’s like remembering a dream, catching the scent of something familiar, but not being quite sure what it means or where it is from.

For a little while the familiarity of the samovar is enough. He sits and inhales the scent and waits for the sound of the water boiling. Once it boils he lets some into the teapot and stands it on top to warm. He can’t make the tea strong enough, but the ritual is good. It’s a ritual he barely remembers, but he knows how to do it. It comes to his hands without thought.

His mind unlatches from those familiar actions, and he’s afraid again. He doesn’t understand. Where is the woman in the cloak? Where is his mother? Why has he seen no one? Sometimes he almost hears a noise. He thinks he’s heard a shout or a quick laugh, but it’s like turning to see someone who isn’t there. He tries to focus on the noise, and it is gone.

He feels so small, so young. He wants to wake up and be himself, his adult self, safe and warm and in the apartment with Napoleon, with Napoleon’s arms around him, and nothing that could harm him. He never wanted to be back here again.

The cup is delicate china, fluted against his hands. The tea barely tastes of tea. It’s barely coloured against the white inside of the cup. A few leaves float on the surface, little brown specks that make him think of islands seen from far, far above. He’s never been in the air, never been in a plane, but he has also flown planes, also cruised at thirty thousand feet, and looked down upon the earth.

There is a headache pressing through the curve of his forehead. He pulls a home-made blanket around his shoulders and sips his tea, and tries not to rock.

  


((O))

  


After a while, he carries the lamp through into the bedroom and sets it down by the bed. It’s so dark now that everything outside the sphere of lamplight is an impenetrable gloom. He looks at his own little bed, tucked against the wall, but he goes to his mother’s; his mother’s and father’s as was, before papa went away to fight. He hasn’t slept in his own bed for months. At night he and his mother huddle together, and he’s glad of her softness and her warmth and her smell. But she’s not here now. She’s not here at all.

He climbs into bed and curls the quilt over himself, curls into the warm shell of a quilt stitched by his grandmother’s hands. He lies there, his eyes on the lamp and the soft shadows on the walls. In his mind he hears a voice singing. He can’t tell if it’s his mother or his grandmother.

_ Баю-баюшки-баю, не ложися на краю. Придет серенький волчок и ухватит за бочок... _

It’s so soft, so familiar, that tears start in his eyes. They grow bigger, hot, welling along his eyelids. Then one spills and trickles down his cheek. He presses his hand against the wet, and wipes it away.

Outside, he hears gunfire again. He can hear shouting, and he can’t tell what language it is in. He wonders if it’s snowing, but he’s too afraid to go to the window and look.

  


10.

  


‘Illya! Illya!’

He can hear a voice, a man calling him. It’s someone he knows. Is he dreaming? He can hardly tell if he’s awake or dreaming. He’s not sure where he is, so perhaps that means he’s dreaming. He’s on his knees, crawling, and his eyes won’t open, and a man’s voice is calling his name. It’s as if someone is shaking him, and calling him from very, very far away. He can’t open his eyes to look. He can’t see. He feels so lost.

  


11.

  


In the morning, the light is pale through the thin bedroom curtain. He lies there for a little while, very small in the large bed, his eyes on the curtain. The light is the blue-white that means there’s still snow out there. The curtain has been the same one all his life, hanging there over the window, more faded on one side than the other. The light comes through the cotton as through a veil.

Can he hear singing? He thinks, maybe, he can hear his mother singing in the kitchen. He hasn’t heard that in so long. He’s missed her voice so much. Without thinking, he’s up out of bed and darting through into the living room.

There’s no sound at all. The flat is empty and cold. Cold blue light comes in through the window. He goes to the kitchen and opens the door, and there’s no one there. Nothing. The food larder has been left open, and the air is so cold his breath clouds in front of his face. His fault, of course. He must have left it open. He closes it quietly, and turns away.

He feels as if there’s something he’s forgotten. There’s something far away. It’s like wanting to wake up, and not being able to. He remembers a dream, someone calling his name. There is a place, somewhere, where he doesn’t feel afraid.

He goes to the balcony doors, and opens them. There’s washing out there, freezing on the line. His mother must have hung it here. It must have been she who did the washing and hung up the clothes. The fabric of the shirts is creased, and snow has been blown into those little ridges and furrows. He traces his fingertip along one of the dips, ploughing out the snow. He tastes it from his fingertip, and it tastes metallic and real.

From inside, he thinks he can hear his mother singing again. She must be in the kitchen, singing. He can hear her voice. But he knows that if he goes back inside, there will be no one there.

In the street below, men are walking. He stands there, shivering in the bitter cold. His feet are bare, freezing into the little cushion of snow on the balcony floor, but somehow he can’t make himself move. He stands and watches that little phalanx of men moving down the street. Their boots make an odd sound, the sound of an automaton moving, a sound of crushing that repeats and echoes itself slightly out of time. It’s the sound of something that cannot be stopped.

He watches them. At first they’re grey because they’re veiled by the drifting snow. Then they’re grey because he can see their uniforms and helmets. He stands very still. He makes a statue of himself, hoping to blend in with the stiff shirts and trousers and dresses hanging on the frozen line. He hardly breathes. His breath was coming out in little frozen clouds, but now his breaths are so shallow there’s hardly any vapour to be seen.

That tramping noise grates against his ears like the sound of a million insects marching. He stands, and moves only his eyes, as they move down the street, across the unprinted snow, leaving churned and dirty footprints in their wake.

They pass by. They move on. Eventually they pass out of sight into the falling snow, and he can move again.

When he gets back inside his fingernails are blue at the edges. He’s shaking so hard that it hurts. His teeth are clashing together, the impacts resounding through his skull. He feels as though he can still hear their marching feet. Of course, he can’t. Of course he can’t. He can’t even hear that distant sound of his mother singing. There’s nothing in the flat. Nothing at all.

His stomach twists. He scrapes up a blanket in numb fingers and wraps it about his shoulders. He goes into the kitchen, and starts looking in the cupboards for food. He had thought the cupboards were empty, but he finds some tins. He finds half a loaf of black bread. There’s a little buckwheat flour in the sack. He stands there, holding a tin in one hand and the loaf in the other, his mind turning. He hears his mother’s voice.

_ Illya, we can only eat a little. There isn’t much _ .

He wants to eat all of the bread. He wants to eat a whole can of sardines. He rations himself, though. He cuts two thin slices of the bread. He peels the lid from the can. He turns the knob on the stove, experimenting, and is startled when the hiss of gas actually starts. He turns the ring off quickly, looks for the matches, finds them, turns the knob again and lights the ring. He pours a little of the oil from the sardines into a flat bottomed pan, and drops in the slices of bread. After a while he decides to throw some of the fish in too, and in the end he has a strong-smelling mess of fried black bread and fish, which he scrapes onto a plate and eats just as it is, standing there in the little kitchen, jabbing a fork into the soft, breaking bread and shoving it into his mouth.

It feels like the first thing he has eaten in a week. He boils some water as he stands there and drinks it from a metal cup, just hot water with nothing in it. The warmth fills him.

He stands, licking the grease from his fingers and sipping at the hot water. He wonders where his mother is. He feels as though he’s in a dream. He feels as though there’s a voice somewhere, very far away. Someone calling him, someone he knows.

There’s a shiver behind him, tracking down his spine like electricity. He looks around, and no one is there.

He puts on clothes. His shoes that are falling apart where the leather joins the soles, that are wearing through over the big toe. He puts on a thick jumper knitted by his grandmother. He can smell his grandfather’s pipe smoke in every woollen knot. The scent presses into him as he pulls it over his head. It’s like being hugged. There are places where his mother has darned holes, and he can see her sitting there, bending over her chore after coming home from work, her needle flashing, head bowed. In one of the darned places there is a hair, greying a little. One of his mother’s hairs, sewn into his clothes.

_ Mama _ , he thinks, and his heart aches.

Where is she? He pulls on his coat and buttons it up, right up so it touches his chin. He twists a scarf around his neck. He pulls on his ushanka and ties the ear flaps under his chin. His grandfather caught the rabbits whose fur line the hat. His head feels warm. He feels loved.

But there’s no one here. He pulls on his gloves, with the hole big enough for a kopek to slip through. He hadn’t told his mother about that. He had been so afraid of worrying her with little things. She had grown so careworn since his father joined the Red Army, since that grey army of invaders entered their city. So he didn’t tell her even about little things, like a hole in his glove the size of a kopek. Now he realises that little things like that might have been her saviours. Maybe she would have relished the chance to sit down and fix a hole in his glove, to feel like she could fix one thing, at least.

His heart aches. Where is she? Where is mama? He can smell her in the flat. He can smell the scent of her thin little cigarettes. He can smell her hair and her clothes. But she isn’t here. It’s like looking for a ghost. He feels as if she’s just behind him, and he turns, and no one is there. Not even a shadow.

  


12.

  


Outside it isn’t snowing any more, but the clouds are still thick. It’s like being under a blanket, as if the whole world is under a blanket raised up a little from a cold winter bed. He wonders if this cloud stretches all the way out of Ukraine, all the way over the great Soviet Union. Perhaps it stretches all the way to Germany. Perhaps it’s over the Americans, so far away. Perhaps the whole world is swaddled away in a ball, insulated from outer space. Perhaps the whole world is covered in snow.

The Americans… Something tugs in him, but he doesn’t know what it is. He imagines them, so far away, money tumbling out of their hands, their mouths, their ears, spewing money as if it’s the only thing that matters. Bright lights, and things, things, things. He feels a little scorn. Doesn’t he have enough things? Doesn’t Grandfather Lenin look after them all?

He walks about the streets, searching. He isn’t sure what he’s searching for. Mama, he thinks. He’s looking for his mother. He sees people, but they’re like ghosts. They’re always on the other side of the street, far away, behind glass. They move like figures in a dream.

The hunger is a knot in his stomach again. There’s so little in the kitchen and he’s afraid of eating it and having nothing left. He revolves kopeks in his pocket, rubbing one metal surface over another, feeling them scrape. If only he can find somewhere with food. But he doesn’t have his ration card. He doesn’t have anything but those few coins. There isn’t any hope of buying food. He thinks of biting into the coins and swallowing them. Ridiculous. Money doesn’t keep you fed.

He thinks of scraping up snow and eating that. That would be more stupid than eating coins.

There’s a dead cat on the ground, a scrap of a thing, something that used to be black and white. Could he take the cat home and eat it? His stomach clenches, and flips. The cat is frozen solid. Could he eat a cat?

He prises it up from the ice and cradles it under his coat like a child. The thought of it makes him sad. So much death. The soldiers look well enough fed. The Soviet winter hasn’t starved them yet. He thinks of the fur in his hat, and of meat. If he had the skill he could make himself something soft and warm from this cat’s fur. He could eat the flesh and suck the marrow from the bones. There are still tins in the cupboards, but he’s afraid of what will happen when the tins run out.

He’s looking for his mother, but he doesn’t see her anywhere. He walks all the way down to the big chemical lab, and there’s no one there. The desks that used to have women ranked behind them are abandoned. There’s no one inside. A window is broken and snow has been driven in. There’s no point in going up to the labs on the second floor, because no one will be in there. His mother won’t be there, and all the men have gone away.

He takes the cat home, and lays it out on the kitchen work surface. It’s beginning to thaw and become soft. It hasn’t been dead too long. Its fur is matted and wet and dirty, but he doesn’t think it’s been dead long. He looks at the array of kitchen tools, and he takes the sharpest knife. He uses it quickly to get rid of the head, because that makes it feel less like a pet, less like something he could have loved. It’s hard work, horrible, gruesome work, and it makes him sweat to try to push the knife through the neck bones. He removes the feet and the head and the tail, and he throws them out of the window into the snow, swallowing to keep his stomach contents inside. It looks more like a creature, less like a pet, but it isn’t until he’s peeled its skin back like removing a coat that it becomes meat, something he thinks he can eat.

He hears his mother’s voice in his head.

_During the famine, Illya, we ate whatever we could get our hands on. We ate pets. Dogs and cats. Desperate people chewed the leather of their shoes. Be grateful for your food. Always be grateful for your food._

It isn’t right. It isn’t right to do this. He carefully slices down the sternum and takes out the guts. They are awful, terrible, and he can’t bear them on his hands. The stench is terrible. He throws them into the snow and feels befouled, and he washes and washes his hands with strong soap, until all he can smell is the soap.

He puts everything else into a pan and boils it in water. It will make a kind of soup. He will eat it, because he has to.

  


((O))

  


Darkness is falling again when he finally feels ready to eat the soup. He’s afraid of the gas running out, so he’s kept it simmering on such a low heat he could hardly hear it cooking. But he sits there and cuts himself two thin slices of black bread, and he eats, eating scraps of meat and dipping the bread in the liquor.

It’s good. It shouldn’t be good, but he’s hungry, and it is good. It’s warm, and it’s good. He covers over what’s left in the pan and sets it aside to cool, then takes the little oil lamp, carrying fire like Prometheus, and goes into the bedroom. He wraps himself in a blanket that smells of his mother, and sits at the head of the bed in a nest of pillows, and sings to himself to pass the time.

_ Illya, do you know the power of fire? Do you know what happened to Prometheus when he gave fire to man? _

_ But it’s a legend, mama. Aren’t all these things legends and fairy tales? Prometheus and Jupiter and Jesus Christ? Aren’t they all legends? _

_ Even legends have power, Illya. And fire has power, even if it’s wrapped up in a story. Always remember how much power fire has. Always be its master, never its slave. _

He isn’t slave to the fire. He has it captured in the lamp, making a warm glow for him. It’s so cold in the bedroom, and he’s too small to make much heat of his own. It was always warmer snuggling close to mama, holding himself against the curve of her body, resting his head on her soft breast. The bed feels so very empty, and he wishes someone were there. Mama, or – someone else. He seems to remember lying close with someone else, but he doesn’t remember who. It’s a thought, a word on the tip of his tongue, always flitting away just as he grasps at it. He’s remembering something like trying to remember a dream.

  


13.

  


In his sleep, he dreams he’s somewhere else. He’s in another city, and there is no snow. The buildings are tall and reflect light like the sparks from the facets of a chandelier. The sun is white in the sky and the trees are losing their leaves, and cars move like shelled beetles along the roads, bright with colour. He stands at the window in an apartment that is warm, that has the scent of being lived in and loved. He looks down on the street, and his hand is on the windowpane, and he watches the cars in the street below. Someone is talking to him, but when he turns around he can’t see properly. It’s a man, but he can’t see who it is. He is there, but it all seems so far away.

  


14.

  


He feels sick at the thought of what’s in the pot on the stove. He left the skin in the food larder, with the thought that it should be useful, that he should be able to make something of it. But he isn’t his grandfather and he doesn’t know how. He wouldn’t know where to start with tanning hide and softening it for use. Maybe somewhere there’s a book. Maybe there’s a book in the library. He should throw the skin out into the snow like he did with the other remnants that reminded him what he’s done, but maybe there’s a book somewhere that will tell him what to do. Maybe he will have to survive like a country boy, making what he can from the scraps he can find.

He doesn’t eat the vile stew this morning. He can’t stomach it. He remembers the cat that used to come mewling about his legs in the morning, and can’t stomach eating what’s in the pan. So he sets it in the food larder so it will stay cold. Perhaps he’ll be glad of it later. For now he makes a slopping mess with buckwheat and water, trying to make pancakes like his mother does, and he eats them with more of the sardines. His stomach grips onto the food and clenches down. He drinks hot water that he warmed in the pan he used to cook the pancakes and heat the sardines, and it’s strange and greasy, but at least it tastes of something. It warms his insides.

He puts on two layers of socks, and his worn out shoes. He pulls on his coat and gloves and ushanka and wraps his scarf around his face. He wants to be warm, but also to be as small as possible. He wants to creep like a mouse. He’s been hearing gunfire and explosions again. They woke him in the night, and they’ve been crackling and shaking as he eats, so he wants to be small as a mouse, and not be seen. But he has to go out into the street. He has to.

He walks through streets that are too empty. There are too many empty windows. The snow is trampled and dirty, and when he passes people they turn away. It’s as if he never sees a face. Everyone is huddled against the cold. He doesn’t hear children playing. Sometimes he hears shouting, and, sporadic enough to shock each time, he hears guns.

‘Don’t go near the park,’ someone mutters. ‘Don’t go there.’

He wasn’t going there, but now he’s afraid. Now he’s drawn. The snow is all trampled and filthy, and he hears a burst of machine gun fire, and another. He imagines he can smell blood, the heat of bodies, the scent of guts. He turns away. He can’t smell those things, surely. It’s too cold. He can smell the acrid, sour scent of spent cordite. He can smell burning and fear.

He turns away from the park and runs down another street, hugging close to the edge of the building. He’s so afraid. He’s afraid of being picked out by someone as having the wrong colour hair, the wrong colour eyes. He’s afraid of being picked out as old enough, as strong enough, being picked out as a threat or a useful body to use in the machine. He stays close to the buildings, and he runs, his heart thrumming against the cage of his ribs, until he comes to the library.

It is a burnt out shell. Joists and pillars rear up like ribs left behind after a cheap cremation. They are black, winnowed, crumbling and bent. He sees the shadows of books on the ground, turned to carbon and ash. They are like dead moths, lying on the ground. There are still little wisps of smoke in some places. He steps into the ruin, and burnt things crack and shift under his feet. Someone, somewhere, shouts, ‘Hey! It’s not safe!’ but he goes in anyway. He remembers the stone steps, the columns, the windows. He remembers the shelves and shelves of books. Somewhere in there, there would have been a book telling him what to do with the skin of a cat. But all the books are dead moths, ghosts of themselves, holding something of their shape, and nothing more. He takes off his gloves and touches them. They feel like silk, but they disintegrate between his fingertips.

He crouches in the ruined mess, and weeps.

  


15.

  


No matter how many times he washes his hands, there’s soot in the lines of his fingers. His fingerprints are marked out in whorls as if he has been caught thieving and compelled to give his prints in ink. He scrubs his hands again and again, and the smell of the soap catches in the back of his throat, but there’s still soot in the lines. The death of books ingrained in his fingers. The water is so cold that his fingers become red and raw, and in the end he scrubs them dry on the towel and pushes them into his armpits and moans with the pain as they warm again.

It’s a miracle there’s still gas in the pipes to the stove, but there’s no hot water.

The building feels like a mausoleum. He never quite glimpses a living soul. He sees someone turning a corner. He hears a child cry or an adult shout from somewhere through the walls. It’s like living with ghosts. He huddles himself in quilts and blankets and sips water heated on the stove, and eats a little of his soup with bread that is growing harder by the day. He feels as though he were living in a dream, in a nightmare. He feels as if he can see people in the corner of his eye, but when he turns there’s nothing there.

He goes to the balcony, blanket-wrapped, and stands looking into the street below. The snow is all trampled into grey hardness, but more flakes are falling. He hears a noise, a kind of howl, and he stands there, riveted. He hears a cry, the desperate cry of a man in fear of death. Then he hears footsteps, running. A man runs down the street, his breath making clouds, his feet slamming and slipping on the snow. He disappears beyond the corner of the building.

Then come the dogs.

A pack, six, seven, maybe eight strong. Lean, hungry dogs. They are dark against the snow. Their tongues loll out, steaming, pink. They are barking, baying. He closes his eyes for a moment and remembers War and Peace. Hunting dogs baying, their hind quarters muscled, their legs a blur.

He opens his eyes and the dogs have passed. There are men now, running, men in grey uniforms. Someone is shouting in a guttural voice, words he doesn’t understand. He can still hear the dogs, and he can hear that man crying out, that scream that means death is close.

He feels so sick. He swallows hard, because he’s afraid of losing the food in his stomach. He stands there for a moment on the balcony, the blankets held hard around him. Then he turns and goes inside.

He puts on his coat again, pulls on his shoes over damp socks, winds his scarf tightly, and pulls his hat down over his ears. His heart is thudding within its cage of ribs. He walks out into the dark corridor outside the flat. He thinks he sees someone just at the end of the corridor, turning the corner and walking away. He calls out but no one replies. He runs, but the only footsteps he can hear are his own.

In the stairwell he sees no one. No one’s using the rubbish shoot. The air is freezing and his breath clouds, and the place smells of damp concrete and rotting things. He runs down, step by step, and he can’t tell if the sound is just the echo of his feet, or someone else running in another stairwell, or below him, above him. It’s terrible to feel so alone.

There’s a twilight in the street that sinks down into all the corners and crevices and makes long shadows in the footprints in the snow. His first step outside makes his breath catch. He is so afraid. His hands are cold inside his gloves. His breath mists out as white droplets in front of his eyes. He can hear the marching men. He can hear the dogs snapping and growling.

He is drawn to them as if there were a string attached to the bottom of his ribs. He walks slowly, shaking, step after step towards the end of the building. The block of flats rises up above him, a great brutalist shell, full of blind eyes looking down impassively, seeing nothing. The snow falls like static in the sky.

The air smells of metal and blood and burning. When he takes in a breath the cold burns his lungs. He walks, putting his feet precisely in the footprints of the men who have just run this way. The snarling of the dogs is a terrible thing. He gets to the corner of the building and slips himself flat against the wall. He moves sideways, and turns his head just a little, looking.

He can see the huddled mass. He can see the soldiers standing in their uniforms, their guns held slackly because they’re not afraid. He can see the movement of the dogs, dark fur wet with snow. He can feel their growls like something sub-sonic that pushes into his bones.

There’s something moving in the centre of it all, a dense nucleus there, full of energy but pinned in place. Is there steam rising? Is it just the breath of the dogs? The man is the nucleus, pinned on the ground, the centre around which dogs and men are revolving. He is the only important thing, and they are tearing him apart.

He turns, spins on the heels of his feet, folds himself away behind the corner of the building again. His stomach lurches, but he holds onto his food. He moves himself back along the building as if he were traversing a ledge, foot by foot, sliding himself back towards the main door. When he reaches the steps he jars his ankle into the concrete, he was so intent on moving along that imaginary ledge.

He runs up the outside steps, exposed, a prey animal. He’s terrified of the dogs catching his scent. He runs into the building and up the stairs and up again and again.

Something clangs and clanks and he almost screams. For a moment he’s frozen, before he recognises the sound of rubbish clattering down the chute. He stands there, hand gripped on the stair rail, listening to the rubbish going down. Bottles and cans. He knows the sound. He’s dropped bottles and cans in himself, and listened to their long, fast journey to death. He can hardly make his neck move to look up. When he does, of course he doesn’t see anyone. There must be someone here, but he can’t see anyone on the stairs. Everything is hidden by angles. Even if there were someone there, on another landing, he wouldn’t see.

He is breathing so fast that his ribs hurt. He makes himself move again, a scared rabbit, up another flight of stairs and along the corridor. He stands at the end, pressed against the wall, panting, the breath scraping in his lungs.

Where is his mother? The need to find her presses at the back of his skull, like something hot, something about to explode. Where is she? She must be somewhere outside. She must be out there somewhere.

His knees are sagging. There’s no strength there. His body’s shaking all over. He thinks of the atoms which make up his body, the electrons singing about their nuclei. His atoms are separating, falling apart. A person could put a hand through him. He has become a ghost.

He staggers to the door of the flat and presses it open. He goes inside and pours himself onto the low settee. He pulls blankets over his body. He lies there, trying to feel like a human being, trying to feel like more than an assembly of elements in loose connection.

After a while, he boils water on the stove and fills a jar and screws the lid on tightly. He takes the jar back to the settee and covers himself with the blankets again, and hugs the warmth against his chest and stomach. He thinks about lying in the family bed with his mother, hugged against her body. Safety. She feels like a wall. She is warm and immovable, and no one will reach him through her.

  


16.

  


There’s a voice singing. The lullaby again.  _ Баю-баюшки-баю, не ложися на краю… _ A gentle rocking, as if he’s on a boat. Maybe he’s a child, a very small child, small enough to be held in someone’s lap. The scent of tobacco that belongs to his grandfather hanging in cloth. The arms of his grandmother, rocking him. Her voice crooning softly above him, the muted sound of her heart against his ear.

The fire is burning in the stove. The metal is ticking as the heat expands it. Perhaps it’s snowing outside, and all the countryside is white, but the fire is burning in the stove and there’s a pile of sticks waiting to be fed into the flames. There’s a scent of bread. Perhaps it’s not even evening. Perhaps it’s daytime, and he’s very small, and baba is rocking him in her arms while her bread bakes in the oven. After a time, he will wake and find himself put down in the bed, alone, but the house will still smell of bread, and when he runs to his baba she will cut him a piece and give it to him, without butter or jam, but better than anything in the world.

  


17.

  


He wakes holding a cold jar of water in his arms, as if he fell asleep holding a laboratory specimen. His joints feel stiff, his jaw feels stiff, his eyes are hot and tired. He must have slept through the night. There’s light coming through the curtains. He fumbles the jar aside and gets up, blanket-wrapped, to go and look through the crack at the street outside. The world is grey and white again. Grey and white still. No snow falling, just a heavy white sky and trampled, icy snow on the street.

He wanders. He doesn’t know what to do. He goes to the sideboard and turns the dial on the radio. There’s static, and more static, and static again. Static like the falling snow, white noise, like blind eyes, like being lost, like being half asleep.

He snaps the dial off. His mother has told him never to turn the radio on, because if he finds anything it will be propaganda, and it will worm into his brain like a disease. He shouldn’t have turned it on. She should have taken the batteries out of the back.

He takes the batteries out now and holds them in his hands, heavy little children sleeping in his palms. He puts them in a drawer and turns the key. Out of sight, out of mind. He mustn’t be tempted again.

He goes to the shelves of books and runs his finger along the spines. The classics. Children’s books with shiny, colourful pictures inside. Textbooks. He pulls out Perelman’s  _ Physics for Entertainment  _ and sits on the settee, wrapped in blankets, the book on his knees. He slips page over page. The perpetual machine. Jumping from a moving car. Floating in the Dead Sea. It’s so familiar he feels warm inside.

He stops and reads instead of just looking. The conundrums and questions feel so simple to him now, and he doesn’t know what he is. Is he an adult man? Is he a child? He looks at himself and he doesn’t know. It’s as if he’s in a dream. He’s scared and he wants his mother, he feels small and alone, but the questions in the book are as simple as a bowl of kasha.

His stomach clenches. He goes into the kitchen and mixes buckwheat flour and water, and cooks himself pancakes. There’s only a little flour left in the bottom of the sack. The bread is all so hard now that he can only eat it by soaking it in water. There are still some tins of food, but what’s he going to do when it’s all eaten?

He remembers his baba’s bread, all of a sudden. He remembers that warm, nutty scent. He remembers her holding her hand in the oven to see it’s the right temperature, sliding in the tray of dough, closing the door as if she were closing a safe on her riches.

He has to go out to find food. There must be coupons somewhere. He’s entitled to his ration. But he’s afraid of appearing alone, he’s afraid of being taken away. Is he a child or a man? He doesn’t know. Perhaps he’s young enough to be ignored, but he’s afraid of being taken away.

Then he thinks of his mother again, with panic clenching inside him. Where is she? How long has he been alone here in the flat? He can’t think. The days are a blur. It’s as if his life were composed of a dream, waking and sleeping, but most of it sleeping. Everything is a blur.

He sits there, trying to control his breathing. He looks at his hands and he can’t tell if they’re an adult’s hands or a child’s hands. When he puts on his shoes they seem like a child’s shoes. There’s the hole over his big toe. There are the splits along the sides, near the soles. He hears his mother’s voice.  _ Your feet grow so fast, Illyusha. How are we going to keep you in shoes? _

He is wearing two pairs of socks, but his shoes have holes in them. The socks will help, but his toes will get cold, and if he isn’t careful his feet will get wet, and then they will freeze. He pulls on a thick jumper, his coat, his scarf. He pulls on his ushanka and folds down the ear flaps and ties them beneath his chin. He goes out into the cold.

  


18.

  


He’s high above the city. He’s in the air, on his front as if he were swimming, looking down. The cloud vapour brushes against his face. Below him serries of snow fall and blow with varying thickness. He doesn’t feel the cold. Below him he can see smoke rising. He can see the buildings in crystal detail despite the snow. He sees ranks and formations of soldiers marching, wheeling, making incredible patterns in a square between blackened buildings. They stamp in unison, march, turn, march again. Above him aircraft are droning, flying across the clouds in their own formations, and the sound is so loud it hums in his ears.

He sees the park, spreading out, white with snow, crossed with the bare black branches of trees. Footprints are tracked across the snow like marching ants. In the centre of the park there is a great wound, a trench in the ground, and in the trench he sees the bodies of men and women and children. He tilts himself, trying to get closer, to see, to be able to do something. The fear keeps him aloft. He can’t make himself low enough to see.

The soldiers are raising their guns and shooting. Bullets fly past him like fireworks rising into the sky. The snow keeps falling. He tilts and turns and tries to get away, but the bullets are a lead rain, rising up. He twists, slips, tries to swim away. He’s falling, like a bird who has been shot through the wing. He’s spinning, falling out of the sky…

He wakes with a scream, and he’s lying in his mother’s bed, panting breath into his lungs, staring at the ceiling in the half-light. He lies there, holding the covers against his chest, his heart hammering. Outside the gunshots continue to sound.

  


19.

  


He’s drawn towards the park. He doesn’t know why. He should be going towards the shops. He should be trying to find something to eat, something to put in his stores to get him through this winter. He wonders where his mother is. He looks at the footprints in the snow, and sees they are almost all of men. All boots, he thinks. Soldiers’ feet. The fear is a sword blade inside him.

He walks towards the park, towards the great wrought iron gates which stand a little open. He’s afraid of what’s beyond them. He can see the leafless trees, their branches all weighted down with snow. He can see the white-covered ground that has been trampled by feet. He’s afraid of the things he’s heard from the park. He used to go there all through the year. In the summer he would lie on the grass and kick his heels in the air. He would swim, he would play and scream and shout. In the winter he used to skate on the ice, throw snowballs, run until he was hot inside his warm clothes.

He stands at the gate, looking through. The snow is falling like a veil again. He can see people moving further across the grass. He can’t tell if they’re people or soldiers. He hears someone calling out an order, and then there’s gunfire. He closes his eyes.

His hand is closed around the wrought iron of the gate. It’s a smooth, cold thing in the grip of his fingers. Without the glove, his hand might freeze to the metal. He thinks about the little hole between finger and thumb, and wonders how his mother darns things. It’s like a kind of magic, how she takes woollen things with holes like that and makes them new again. It’s like the magic his grandmother uses to make her quilts.

He remembers summer with his grandparents, out in that little house, surrounded by swaying fields of golden grain. Summers like that never seemed to end. The scent of baking bread, the scent of ripening wheat and hot earth. The cackle of the geese in the yard. The smoke in the air.

He remembers summers here in the city, the high sun striking on the domes of the churches. He remembers the cool of the river, the water enveloping him like silk as he runs into the shallows, kissing his body over every bit of skin. He remembers swimming, and there being bright blue sky and flashing water, the shouts of other children, the sun pressing down on his wet hair and shoulders.

It’s hard to believe that this is the same place. It’s hard to imagine it ever being warm again.

He opens his eyes and looks through the falling snow. There’s someone there, a woman in a cloak and hood, the snow coming down and settling so gently on that hood and the shoulders of the cloak. He suddenly remembers a smell. The scent of damp wool, his mother coming in from the rain, laughing, sweeping off her cloak and shaking off the drops.  _ It’s old but it still keeps me dry _ . The laugh in her voice, the joy that makes him joyful. He loves it when his mother is happy. It’s as if the sun has come out no matter what the weather outside.

He starts forward, through the gate, into the park. She’s there, wearing her cloak, standing in the falling snow. She’s too far away. He starts to run, but the snow is growing thicker. It’s whirling into a blizzard. He runs and holds out his hand, calls out, ‘Mama! Mama!’

He blinks snow out of his eyes. There’s no one there, no woman in a cape. There’s just –

He gasps, and snowflakes enter his mouth and melt inside. There’s a stand of undergrowth, and there’s a body there. There’s a woman there, but it’s not his mother. A dark haired woman lying under the bushes, lying in the snow. She’s so naked that he doesn’t know where to look, but it doesn’t matter where he looks because she’s so desperate that her nakedness is nothing. Her eyes are black and alive. She is too cold to shiver. Her skin looks blue, but it’s streaked with blood. He can’t see a wound, but she’s covered in blood.

For a moment he can’t move. He thinks about the gunshots that he heard. He thinks about the shouted orders. He looks down at the woman. Then he turns and runs.

All the way back to the flat his thoughts are beating with his heartbeat in his head. He sees the woman lying there, blue with cold, so thin, her eyes alive like a bird’s, shining into his. He runs and runs, and when he gets home he runs straight into his mother’s bedroom. He tears open her cupboards and drawers and drags out clothes. They are good clothes, good, thick winter clothes. He’s afraid for what his mother will say when she finds they’re gone, but he doesn’t have a choice. He finds layers of clothes, socks, underwear. He can only find thin, summer shoes. He wraps it all up into a tightness that he can hold under his arm.

He races back to the park, his heart hammering, his breath cold and scratching in his throat. The woman is still there, eyes like a bird. Still lying there, blue and naked, blood-streaked, and staring with eyes like a bird. The snow is coming down so thickly he can only see for a few feet before him. It’s covering everything. He pushes the clothes at her and she makes a noise in her throat, a kind of sob. She looks as if she can hardly move. He’s afraid to help. He’s afraid that making any contact with her will make a man with a gun appear. He’s afraid it will mean a bullet through his skull.

Her lips move, but there’s no words. He can’t just stand and pretend he hasn’t done this. All he can do is help. So he crouches down and helps. He helps her pull her legs and arms into the underwear. He helps her drag the skirt up her legs. He fastens the buttons for her. He helps her into the blouse and helps her pull the thick cardigan over her arms. Her skin is so cold that it feels like rubber. She doesn’t feel real.

She’s shaking now, and he can hardly bear to look at her. Now she’s wearing his mother’s clothes, she looks like a real woman. She must be too cold to talk, too cold to cry. He wants to bring her back to his home, but he’s afraid.

He fits the shoes onto her feet, and feels a stabbing pain at the thinness of the leather. They’re too thin for this weather. But they’re all he has. They’re too big. Her feet are small. The shoes go on, at least. They’re better than bare feet.

He wants his mother. He wants to weep.

She’s sitting there in the snow, shaking. There is a blizzard around them. He doesn’t know what to do now. Maybe like a rescued bird, she’ll fly away.

  


  


20.

  


He’s dreaming. He is in his mother’s bed, covered with the quilt that smells of everything he loves, and he is sinking into dreams. He is looking for his mother, but he can’t find her. He’s in his grandmother’s house, and the snow is falling outside. He goes to the door and looks out into the snow, but there are so many footprints out there he can’t tell which he should follow. He doesn’t want to go into the cold. He turns around and there’s a man there, dark-haired, so familiar he wants to cry. He just wants to be held. He feels so alone. There’s so much cold coming through the door, and his grandmother snaps at him to shut it quickly. He’s afraid his grandfather will be angry. But there’s the man standing there, smiling.

_ Napoleon _ , he thinks.

He hardly knows what that word means. The man is wearing a grey suit. He looks so out of place. Illya stumbles forward to him and leans against him, leans against his chest, welcoming the tight hug of his arms. The man is saying his name, over and over.  _ Illya, Illya, Illya… _ It sounds as if it’s coming from far away, but he can feel it in the man’s chest. He can feel his own name vibrating through those ribs.

There are hands on his shoulders, someone standing behind him as he tries to hold onto the dark haired man. His grandmother.

_ You can’t go back, Illya. You’ll live with us now. Just you and me and didus. The three of us against the world, yes? We’ll keep you safe. _

He doesn’t want to live with baba and didus. He wants his mother. He wants his mother so badly it feels as if his guts are falling out. He holds onto the dark haired man and weeps. He can see his mother there, standing on the other side of the room, out of reach. She looks worried. She looks afraid. She’s dead, but she’s there, she’s holding out her hand. All he wants is to be with his mother, but she’s on the other side of the room, and she may as well be a thousand miles away.

  


  


21.

  


In the streets the men are making shapes. He’s looking down on them from above. They’re marching, marching, a block of them making a square, then a rectangle, then a square again. Their legs come up in unison, stamp down again, a ricochet of noise as each boot stamps on snow. He’s looking down from above, from a window, watching them move.

He stays small and quiet while they’re marching. He only comes down once they’re gone. The voice of the commander rang through the streets, harsh and incomprehensible, but now they’ve marched away. He comes down the narrow stairs and slips out of the door of the church where he was hiding, and steps into the cold.

The sky is thick with cloud, white from horizon to horizon. He has managed to get some food, and he holds it in a net bag, tight against his body. His feet are cold and his hands are cold in his gloves. He feels as though he hasn’t slept for days. He did sleep. He’s sure he slept, but he feels as though there were no sleep at all.

He sees her again, the figure in the cloak, just disappearing around the corner of a building. Her hood is over her head, protecting her from the cold.

_ Mama,  _ he thinks. It’s a cry inside his head. He wants to run after her, but he doesn’t run. He walks.

He walks almost at the same pace, a little faster, so he comes closer but doesn’t catch her up. Her footprints are in the snow, real little hollows made by real feet. He hangs back then, not quite catching her. He wants her, but he’s scared to catch her. He follows her instead, down the street, over the crossing, down another street. Buildings all around him stare with glazed eyes. He can smell burning. Somewhere he can hear shots.

She turns into a narrow street. The buildings are tall on both sides, casting their darkness over the road. He’s afraid, afraid to follow her, afraid of what he’s going to see. There are men falling into step between him and her. Three men, and dogs. Soldiers in grey uniforms. They follow her down that dark street, and his heart squeezes inside him. He hears their feet on the snow. He hears them walking with purpose, the dogs panting and whimpering. He is so afraid his skull is going to burst with fear.

It’s all so far away. He sees them approach her. He hears them speak but he can’t make out their words. Then she’s screaming, and they’re hitting her. They’re pushing her up against the wall, and he doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know what they’re doing. They take their turns, pressing her against the wall, and she screams and screams, and then one of them hits her with the butt of his gun, and she falls like a shot animal.

He can’t move. He needs to run to her, but he can’t move. He stands there as if his feet have been frozen into the ground. They’re kicking her. They’re laughing. The dogs are standing by, quivering with excitement, their sounds high pitched and desperate. Then the men release the dogs, and they’re on her, over her, tearing at her where she lies on the ground. He’s so terrified he can hardly see, as if he’s looking down the length of a tunnel. So terrified he can’t move, can’t make a noise. So terrified his stomach wants to explode out of his mouth.

He presses himself against the wall, presses a fist into his mouth. He bites down so hard that he tastes blood in his mouth. He can see blood in the snow. He can see the dogs, tearing, growling. He can see that bright poppy red of blood all over the snow. She’s lying like a discarded doll, and they are tearing her apart.

He’s so afraid, so afraid. The scream is frozen inside him. It won’t come out. The men stand there, watching what the dogs are doing, and he can see terrible things, parts of his mother he should never be allowed to see. He can see guts spilling out onto the snow. He can see bones.

He stands there for a long, long time. He stands there after the men call the dogs off and they all move away. He stands there, the light turning from dull white to violet, the part-melted snow turning to an icy crust. He can’t feel his feet any more. He can’t feel his fingers. The red all over the snow is like a scream. He stands there as another dog, a scraggly stray, comes over, sniffs, and licks at the red snow. He stands there as it growls and drags away a piece of flesh. He stands there as black birds hop closer, investigate, peck at the remains, chatter to one another, and fly away.

It’s dark when he finally moves. He can only move when the light has fallen far enough to hide that stain in the snow. He can’t make himself go closer. He moves away, backs away, hugs the shadows and corners so that no one sees him, until he is back at the block of flats. He slips in through the doorway. His heart is singing in his ears. He is still with cold, too cold to shiver. He walks up the stairs like a robot with rusted joints.

  


  


22.

  


In his sleep he’s crying. He’s deep in a dream. He can smell blood, and he wants his mother. He turns and flails and feels the soft wrap of sheets around him. He is afraid and he doesn’t know why. Someone is stroking his hair, and he turns and turns again and tries to get closer to the murmuring voice, but he can’t wake up. Sleep is like a net over him, held down with lead weights, and he can’t wake up.

He feels lips on his forehead, kissing him. Still, he can’t wake up. The dreams drag at him like seaweed, wrap around him and pull him down. He wants his mother, and he can smell blood. He can see snow falling, he can smell the metallic tang of snow. There are shots echoing somewhere, and the smell of blood, and he turns and tries to grasp out, but there’s nothing to catch hold of. There’s nothing to stop him drowning.

  


((O))

  


The hand is stroking his cheek, stroking his hair. He can smell tobacco and wood smoke. His grandmother’s voice is very soft, softly singing. He’s too old for lullabies, but she’s singing to him still. He doesn’t want to sleep. He wants to run out of the door, into the snow. He wants to run back to the city, to find his mother. Somewhere, she must be there. She must be somewhere.

‘Shush, Illyusha,’ his grandmother whispers, and her hand strokes gently again.

He can feel how old her hand is. His mother’s hands felt young, but this is an old hand, leathern and cool. Everything smells of the cottage. Wood smoke, tobacco, baking bread. He remembers the smell of blood and shit intermingling in the snow. It makes his throat swell. It makes him want to be sick.

  


  


23.

  


‘Illya. Illya.’

The voice goes on and on. A man’s voice, speaking softly, very close to him. Noises somewhere, little beeps. A clattering further away. A hand stroking his forehead. He feels cold, but there’s no smell of snow. The need to sleep is so strong. He is drowning. He’s sinking down under warm waves.

The voice goes on and on, but he’s in the depths, looking up, seeing that he’s lying beneath thick clouds like a spread quilt, that snow is falling. He can smell burning and cordite and blood. The fear is an icicle inside him, spearing vertically through his chest. He’s running down the street, looking for his mother, and there are dogs coming. He can hear their pounding feet. He can hear their panting, their whimpering calls. He needs to find his mother. He needs to find her before – before – 

‘Illya. Illya.’

He can hear the voice again, the man’s voice somewhere. It’s far away, far above him, drifting somewhere above the surface. He looks up at the clouds, and there’s nothing there. Just thick, billowing whiteness, and falling flakes of snow.

‘Illya.’

It’s like the ground is shaking. Something is shaking. He turns his head this way and that, tries to see. There’s a building behind him, a black, burnt-out shell. The beams are trembling. Something is groaning deep inside the blackened stone. The whole thing is shaking, as if an earthquake has burst up in the ground. He feels himself shaken, hears the voice again calling his name.

Is his mother there? He needs to find her. He needs – 

‘Illya.’

He’s being shaken. A hand on his shoulder. He shakes his head and blinks. There’s bright light above him. His throat feels so dry. He feels so weak.

‘Hey, Illya. Come on now. Are you with me?’

He blinks against the light. The air smells of antiseptic. His body is pressed by sheets and blankets. He turns his head and sees a face, dark hair, a smile. It takes a moment for his eyes to focus.

‘That’s it. There you are. Are you with me?’

He feels such a rush of love for Napoleon that tears come. He tries to speak, but there’s something in his mouth. Something is pressing his tongue, something between his teeth, something in his throat. He can hardly move. He feels so weak he can hardly move.

‘Are you with me, Illya?’ Napoleon asks, and he manages to nod.

Napoleon’s hand is in his, and his fingers tighten. He tries to return the grip but he can hardly move. He can feel tears trickling down his face. Napoleon wipes them away, bends down, kisses his cheek.

‘I need to call the doctor in,’ he says. ‘I’ll only be a moment.’

Illya lies there and watches him walk away. The fear spreads over him again. He’s afraid of sleep. He’s afraid of being drowned. He tries to make a noise and it comes out as a wordless cry.

Napoleon stops at the door, turns round, comes back to him and touches his cheek.

‘I promise. I’ll be back in a moment, love.’

He watches Napoleon leave the room. He lies there, his eyes on the door, desperately clinging to the feeling of being awake. It’s like taking in a deep breath. He’s so afraid of sinking again.

  


  


24.

  


‘You were in a coma for three weeks,’ Napoleon tells him later.

He’s sitting up a little in bed. There are tubes everywhere, but not in his mouth, at least. He feels ill, weak, and so, so thirsty. He feels as though he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

‘Thrush?’ he asks, because that’s always where his thoughts go first.

Napoleon shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so. They never found out exactly what it was. Some kind of infection, something in your brain. Maybe you picked it up on our travels. Maybe it was dumb bad luck.’

‘Dumb bad luck,’ he murmurs.

He feels stupid and slow. He feels odd all through, as if everything were slow and far away from him.

‘It started out with hallucinations, blacking out. Then I just couldn’t wake you up. I woke up in the morning, Illya, and you wouldn’t wake up. It was like you were – trapped in a dream.’

He feels as if he were trapped in a dream. He lets his eyes close, and remembers. The snow falling. Searching, searching. Looking for his mother. Every time he was looking for his mother.

It’s like falling. It’s like something being ripped from him, like his diaphragm being ripped out and everything falling from his chest. His mother…

‘I – didn’t remember,’ he murmurs.

Blood. Falling snow. Fire. Men with guns.

‘What, Illya?’ Napoleon asks him, putting a hand on his arm.

His hand feels warm. It feels so good to have that human contact.

‘Did I tell you about my childhood?’ he asks abstractedly, as if he’s talking about a stranger.

Napoleon shrugs. ‘Not much, no. Not much more than it says in your file. You lived with your grandparents until they died. Then – ’

‘Schools, and the navy,’ Illya murmurs.

They had brought him up from his mid-teens. They had been his family, in the same way that an orphanage is a child’s family.

‘Well, that’s all,’ Napoleon shrugs. ‘There’s not much else in your file. Something about records being destroyed in the war. Something about you – ’

He clears his throat, and Illya slips a glance at him. He knows it’s a delicate subject, that Napoleon is approaching it with delicacy. He knows there’s a note in his file about trauma-induced amnesia. He knows it concerns Waverly and the U.N.C.L.E. psychiatrists, but he’s always insisted it’s not a problem. It never has been a problem. There’s just always been a gap in his memory, and that cold dread of dogs. He’s always resisted the psychiatrists’ suggestions of talking it through.

‘I – was dreaming,’ he says slowly. He doesn’t know how to talk about it. Does he even know if it were real? He’s sure it was real. ‘I – had a lot of dreams.’

‘They said that you might be able to hear me. I spent a long time talking to you. Holding your hand, talking to you. Waverly wanted to send me overseas. I took leave instead. I sat here and held your hand. Did you even know I was there?’

‘Sometimes,’ Illya says.

He can’t bear to tell Napoleon he was entirely in another world. He was there sometimes, he thinks, like a figure in a dream. Somehow, Napoleon is always with him, like another part of his soul.

‘I don’t mind, you know,’ Napoleon tells him. ‘I don’t mind if you had no idea at all. I needed to be here with you.’

It’s like falling. Being there in the flat. Lying in his mother’s bed. The scent of it all. Standing on the balcony, watching the falling snow. The park across the street.

A memory like a ghost. His father, wearing a stiff uniform, folding his arms around him. The smell of cigarettes. The smell of his father. His father promising he would come back. 

Like falling. He gasps, and Napoleon is immediately alert.

‘You okay? Illya? Do you need – ’

He nods. His neck feels stiff. ‘I’m all right,’ he says, then he asks, ‘Water. Can I have some water?’

Napoleon hands him a glass. The water is cold and fresh, but it tastes different. He distinctly remembers how the water tasted at home in the flat, and this is different.

‘Memories,’ he says.

Napoleon squeezes his hand.

‘What did you dream about?’

He lets the cool water slip down his throat again. He lets it spread into his body. He remembers snow falling. He remembers the scent of his mother. He remembers the dogs…

‘I – think the psychiatrists are going to have a field day,’ he says.

‘You know, dreams don’t mean – ’ Napoleon begins, but Illya shakes his head. These dreams mean everything.

‘When I’m better,’ he begins, and looks at Napoleon tentatively, because he hasn’t heard yet about whether there will be a  _ better _ .

Napoleon nods. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, Illya, they’re sure you’re going to be just fine. The infection has been knocked out. The antibodies in your blood are back to normal. No reason why you shouldn’t recover.’

‘Okay,’ he nods. ‘When I’m better, I want to go to Kyiv. There are things I – ’

Napoleon looks bewildered, as well he might. Illya feels as though Napoleon should know intimately what happened in all of his dreams, but of course he doesn’t know.

‘I have – remembered a lot,’ he says carefully. ‘When I’m better, I want to go home. I want to – check.’

There’s such a depth of worry in Napoleon’s eyes. Of course it’s hard, going back to the U.S.S.R.. It’s always hard. But if his U.N.C.L.E. credentials can’t swing it, then nothing will.

‘Illya, what did you dream about?’ Napoleon asks.

‘Everything,’ Illya says.

He can’t talk about it. There’s no way to encapsulate it. His grandmother’s quilts. The smell of blood. Huddling with his mother in bed, pressed against her body for warmth and comfort. The way the little kitchen looked. The taste of the water. The soldiers marching in the streets. He had always remembered his grandparents, the low little house with the fields all around it, the rippling fields of wheat and the winter snow. Before that, there had always been a void.

‘Will you come with me?’ he asks.

‘Always, my love,’ Napoleon promises him. ‘And – will you tell me? Can you tell me what you’ve remembered?’

‘I will,’ Illya nods.

He knows he will, in time. He will tell Napoleon everything. Right now, he needs to process. He needs to lie here and remember. The snow falling. The feeling of his mother’s arms. The little flat, the kitchen, the samovar boiling, the warm colours and all those scents. The snow-covered streets, the marching men, the guns. Most of all he wants to remember the feeling of his mother’s arms around him, holding him as if she could never let go.


End file.
